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Translation and the Indian Tradition:156 Some Illustrations, Some Insightsthrough gestures) since an elaborate and well developed language ofgestures exists which is capable both of description and narration.Concepts like alamkara (ornamentations), dosas (defects),gunas (qualities), bhāvas (emotions expressed successfully throughart) and riti (style) are common to music, painting, dance as well asliterature. It is perhaps because of this interrelation that around the16 th century A.D., there evolved a form of painting known asRāgmālā. This is the depiction of the rāgas (musical forms) througha series of paintings. Such a radical conceptualization – translatingsomething that is temporal and transient into something spatial andstatic – would not have been possible without a set up in which thevarious art forms shared many values, strategies and ideals.Hence, stories belonging to the corpus of our tradition couldbe enacted in plays, dance forms, indicated in murals or paintings ortransmitted through songs. A great degree of translatability amongmodes existed in such a tradition. Notions of authorship did notinterfere with such translations or, as I have tried to suggest,‘transmutations’.In the background of such inter-modal exchanges that Indianaesthetics permitted, it is not difficult to point to possible ways oftranslating between different languages and even cultures.I shall begin with the observations that T.R.S. Sharmamakes about Indian poetics and translation and then build on thoseideas. In the context of rasa, he considered it the shaping principle,the inner rhetoricity working through the text and shaping it (Sharma2004: 148-49). Rasa can also be considered the aesthetic emotionthat pervades the work that gives it its emotion-based orientation.Unless this is successfully transmitted to the audience, according toIndian poetics, the work fails. The same principle can apply totranslation. Though it looks apparently innocent, this can be radical